te--that ultimate
moral truth is immediate, like the truth that two and two make four. It
might, of course, be contended that the same Reason which assures me that
goodness is worth having and that the whole is greater than the part,
assures us no less immediately of the existence of God. I can only say
that I am sure I have no such immediate knowledge, and that for the most
part that knowledge is never claimed by people who understand clearly the
difference between immediate knowledge and inference. The idea of God is
a complex conception, based, not upon this or that isolated judgement or
momentary experience, but upon the whole of our experience taken
together. It is a hypothesis suggested by, and necessary to, the
explanation of our experience as a whole. Some minds may lay most stress
upon the religious emotions themselves; others upon the experience of the
outer world, upon the appearances of design, or upon the metaphysical
argument which shows them the inconceivability of matter without mind;
others, again, may be most impressed by the impossibility of accounting
in any way for the immediate consciousness of duty and the conviction of
objective validity or authority which that consciousness carries with it.
But in any case the knowledge, when it is a reasonable belief and not
based merely upon authority, involves {118} inference--just like our
knowledge of our friend's existence. The fact that my friend is known to
me by experience does not prevent his communicating his mind to me. I
shall try to show you in my next lecture that to admit that our knowledge
of God is based upon inference is not incompatible with the belief that
God has spoken to man face to face, as a man speaketh to his friend.

At this point it may perhaps be well, for the sake of clearness, to
summarize the position to which I have tried to lead you. I have tried
to show that the material Universe cannot reasonably be thought of as
having any existence outside, or independently of, Mind. It certainly
does not exist merely in any or all of the human and similar minds whose
knowledge is fleeting, and which have, there is every reason to believe,
a beginning in time. We are bound then to infer the existence of a
single Mind or Consciousness, which must be thought of as containing all
the elements of our own Consciousness--Reason or Thought, Feeling, and
Will--though no doubt in Him those elements or aspects of Consciousness
are combine